Time's Corollary
by Gnom DePlume
Summary: An older Lydia calls Beetlejuice one last time, but he's never what you expect.


DISCLAIMER: I claim no ownership.

A/N: This is just a really weird one-shot plotbunny that wouldn't leave me alone.

TIME'S COROLLARY

Dramatically throwing out her black clad arms, she chanted, "Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, BEETLEJUICE!"

And waited.

And waited.

When nothing but the breeze wafted over her high rise apartment's balcony, Lydia chuckled darkly to herself and took a pull from the bottle of gin in her hands.

Thirty-five years old, a successful gallery owner, and desperately drunk, she fell into one of the wrought iron chairs, hardly feeling it, and plunked the half-empty bottle on the table next to several others. "Guess he really is gone."

"Who's gone?" The rough voice she hadn't heard for decades was like music to her ears.

She hardly dared look, but there he was, lounging in the other chair, smoking, in all his wild-haired, beer-bellied glory, looking as dead as ever.

"Juno told me you'd never bother me again."

"If ya don't want me fucking botherin' ya, why the hell'd ya call me?" He pushed back from the table and stood up, stubbing out his smoke on the glass top. "Three little words and I'm gone." He made an expansive gesture, glaring at her expectantly.

She smiled wryly. "I didn't mean it that way," she said as gently as she could anymore. "Sit down, have a drink. I never thought I'd see the day when you wanted to go Back."

He scuffed his feet and rubbed the back of his moldy neck wearily, and suddenly he didn't seem quite so unchanged. "Look, thing is, I'm on a smoke break right now," he said finally.

"Bioexorcism?" she asked curiously.

"Nah," he said. "Nah. I'm workin' as Juno's assistant again. I'm a reformed ghost, see?" He finally met her eyes and she quailed at the dullness of them, the flat depths.

"Yeah. I can tell." She swallowed hard.

He lit another cigarette with a snap of his fingers, didn't take a pull. "I've got a girlfriend now, y'know. So…." His eyes raked down her black shirt and panties, her sleepwear. She knew she looked good, even with the added years.

Wobbily, her smile half-returned and she rested her forehead on her palm. "That's great for you. Congratulations. I hope you're happy."

"I am," he said, a little too quickly.

She raised the gin bottle. "A toast to the happy couple." Then she drained it, dropping the empty glass container hollowly back onto the glass tabletop.

"Whoah, hey, you're not tryin' to do somethin' stupid, are ya, babes?" His crazy eyebrows furrowed and he half-reached for her before drawing his hand back and looking at it like it was a traitor. "Not that I care." He finally remembered his cig and dragged on it like it was gonna save the life he hadn't had for six hundred years.

She snorted unsteadily. "My name's Lydia," she pointed out.

"I _know_ that." He rolled his eyes. "As if I've got the time now to show up when Joe Schmoe calls my name."

"That's something, at least." She leaned back, letting her head loll on the back of the seat, and crossed her legs. "Do you know, I used to imagine calling you all the time, when life was unutterably boring, to see what chaos you'd shake up. It gave me, I don't know, not strength, but attitude. Felt like anything could happen." She scrubbed her face with her hands. "God, seems silly now, huh?"

She got up and crossed the few steps to stand in front of him. He tensed as she reached out, but all she did was straighten his rumpled tie. "You don't have to worry about me. I've got enough damn paperwork of my own to want to spend my afterlife on more of the same." She sighed, whispering his name three times.

Then he was gone and she clumsily gathered up the bottles, stumbling inside with them to the trash where she dumped them. Going into the bathroom, she brushed her teeth and drank water straight from the tap in an effort to stave off a hangover. Her eyes prickled, but she ended up laughing until she was sick and had to brush her teeth again.

As she curled up under the covers of her bed and tried to warm her icy limbs from the late autumn chill, she started crying. She smothered the soul-wracking sobs in her pillow, but even as she cried herself to sleep she did not think of smothering herself, like she might have once, a very long time ago.


End file.
